Selective adsorption of the cationic dye rhodamine-6G from aqueous solution by phosphotungstic acid@MOF-199 composites

In this paper, H₃[ P(W₃O₁₀)₄]@MOF-199 composites ([email protected]) were successfully synthesized by a simple one-step reaction under solvothermal conditions and characterized by XRD, SEM, FT-IR and N₂ adsorption–desorption isotherms. Additionally, rhodamine-6G (Rh6G, a cationic dye) and methyl orange (MO, a anionic dye) as model dyes were employed to assess its adsorption performance. The adsorption capacity of MOF-199 towards Rh6G and MO were enhanced and weakened respectively after the introduction of PTA (from 8.6 mg/g to 41 mg/g; 11.4 mg/g to 2.6 mg/g) proving that the selective adsorption capacity for the cationic dye of porous MOF-199 could be improved through the modification of PTA. Moreover, in diverse initial concentrations of single Rh6G and MO aqueous solutions (10 mg/L, 25 mg/L, 50 mg/L and 100 mg/L), [email protected] exhibited much higher adsorbing capacity towards Rh6G (about 25, 30, 11 and 16 times higher than that of MO). In mixed dyes adsorption studies, the adsorption capacity of [email protected] towards Rh6G (2.871 mg) are nearly five times larger than that of MO (0.437 mg) even in a solution with a higher concentration of MO than Rh6G (5 mg/L of Rh6G and 10 mg/L of MO). The kinetic study indicated that the adsorption of the Rh6G and MO onto [email protected] followed the pseudo second-order model well. The isotherm obtained from experimental data fitted the Freundlich model (the linearly dependent coefficient are 0.99839 and 0.94845 for Rh6G and MO respectively) indicating multilayer adsorption mechanism. In summary, all these results implied that the as-prepared [email protected] is of great potential to be used as a cationic pollutants adsorbent with high efficiency and selectivity.